An installment in John T. Edge’s Points South column, Local Fare. Time at Helen’s raises questions, small and large. Other than great barbecue, and my respect and affection for the woman who owns the restaurant, what calls me to Brownsville?…by
John T. Edge |
Sep, 2018

Notes on the songs from our 20th Southern Music Issue Sampler featuring North Carolina. The profiles, eulogies, and essays herein boast of remarkable achievements of North Carolina’s musicians across eras and genres: from unassailable legends (High Point’s John Coltrane, Tryon’s…by
Oxford American |
Nov, 2018

Sarah Winchester and the legacy of living with guns It’s difficult to understate how the repeating rifle revolutionized killing, of both animals and man, as it brought the world from the single-shot muzzle-loaded rifle to a gun that could hold multiple…by
Sara A. Lewis |
Sep, 2018

A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue. One morning in the summer of 1996, Damian Hart was standing naked on a pier in the Aegean Sea. The sun was bearing down on Mount Athos, one of several craggy peninsulas…by
Nick Tabor |
Sep, 2018

A poem from the Fall 2018 issue. None of this surprises you now, does it? I’m not sure I can know that, I responded to myself. Or I think I did. I should have. A friend told me to embrace my disorientation here, to attend to…by
Curtis Bauer |
Sep, 2018

A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue. The dock at Mountain Lake is everything a dock should be—whitewashed clapboard, punctuated by an airy pavilion with a red roof—but if you jumped off it, all you’d hit is earth.…by
Nell Boeschenstein |
Sep, 2018

A Points South story from the Fall 2018 issue In the evenings, after the day’s rain, my grandfather drove through Starke counting cars in the lots of other motels, doing the math and feeling like a winner. For guests visiting…by
Scott Korb |
Sep, 2018

A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue. Prine radiates a sense of well-being, along with a sort of amused nonchalance toward potential disaster. This is a good thing, because the Coupe, as it turns out, has no passenger-side safety…by
Tom Piazza |
Oct, 2018

One month after Hurricane Harvey, Episcopal Priest Bertie Pearson visited Aransas Pass, Texas, to document the disaster. He found a city in ruins, as if it “had been lifted up and shaken, sending homes, boats, and trees flying in all directions.”

Hunting season swept through my hometown with the crisp northern winds that sent leaves and trash dancing down King Street, near the Old Spanish Trail. In late fall, the town’s annual hunters’ gathering—Buck Fever—packed the county fairgrounds with guns and taxidermy and families wearing matching camouflage outfits, scents of damp hay and manure and hot funnel cakes swirling together in the cool dry air. It seemed like everyone in Seguin went to Buck Fever, and even though we weren’t real hunters, my family went, too.

They said adolescent despair; they said anger turned inward; if they were Sidney Grau, M.D., Ph.D, consoling Tansy’s mother by the family's blue expanse of swimming pool on New Year’s Eve, they said troubled child at the end of the twentieth century. But Tansy’s sadness, which was hers and no one else’s, didn’t explain why this pair who looked like her mother and father suddenly had morphed into Mike and Carol Brady on an extended car trip: sharing the road, taking time to smell the flowers, smiling vacant, creepy smiles.

We wore cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans hitched around our skinny waists with braided belts and rodeo belt buckles and fought with other aspiring tough boys who called themselves cholos. No doubt I was getting a reputation around town as a hellion.

With a backpack full of disposable cameras, Micah Fields walked over a hundred miles of Houston—his hometown, a city notorious for its “unwalkability”—to capture its vibrant communities and surprising geographical “idiosyncrasies.”

These assemblages don’t need to be explicitly religious to suggest the spiritual potency of ordinary things. That simple things—especially things detached from ordinary meaning—may acquire a higher meaning. That these objects make no obvious representational sense makes sense. Who knows what spiritual beings look like, after all? Platonic forms?

His songs have been recorded by the Dead Milkmen, Yo La Tengo, Pearl Jam, Beck, and Tom Waits. Kurt Cobain was often photographed wearing one of his Hi, How Are You t-shirts. David Byrne sang his praises, Bill T. Jones choreographed a ballet to his music, and Matt Groening said he was his favorite songwriter. According to Bowie, “Daniel Johnston is an American treasure.”